Description

Trinity was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was of an implosion-design plutonium bomb, or "gadget" – the same design as the Fat Man bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. Concerns about whether the complex Fat Man design would work led to a decision to conduct the first nuclear test. The code name "Trinity" was assigned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory; the name was possibly inspired by the poetry of John Donne.